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Abstract-In

During the recent coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, telehealth has received greater attention due to its role in reducing hospital visits from patients with COVID-19 or other conditions, while supporting home isolation in patients with mild symptoms. The needs of patients with chronic diseases tend to be overlooked during the pandemic. With reduced opportunities for routine clinic visits, these patients are adopting various telehealth services such as video consultation and remote monitoring. We advocate for more innovative designs to be considered to enhance patients’ feelings of “copresence”—a sense of connection with another interactant via digital technology—with their health care providers during this time. The copresence-enhanced design has been shown to reduce patients’ anxiety and increase their confidence in managing their chronic disease condition. It has the potential to reduce the patient’s need to reach out to their health care provider during a time when health care resources are being stretched.

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We have demonstrated active coherent beam combination (CBC) of up to 218 semiconductor amplifiers with 38.5 W cw output using up to eleven one-dimensional 21-element individually addressable diode amplifier arrays operating at 960 nm. The amplifier array elements are slab-coupled-optical-waveguide semiconductor amplifiers (SCOWAs) set up in a master-oscillator-power-amplifier configuration. Diffractive optical elements divide the master-oscillator beam to seed multiple arrays of SCOWAs. A SCOWA was phase actuated by adjusting the drive current to each element and controlled using a stochastic-parallel-gradient-descent (SPGD) algorithm for the active CBC. The SPGD is a hill-climbing algorithm that maximizes on-axis intensity in the far field, providing phase locking without needing a reference beam.

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We report the demonstration of a 1.5 microm InGaAsP mode-locked slab-coupled optical waveguide laser (SCOWL) producing 10 ps pulses with energies of 58 pJ and average output powers of 250 mW at a repetition rate of 4.29 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first passively mode-locked slab-coupled optical waveguide laser. The large mode and low confinement factor of the SCOWL architecture allows the realization of monolithic mode-locked lasers with high output power and pulse energy. The laser output is nearly diffraction limited with M2 values less than 1.2 in both directions.

We demonstrate 35 W output peak power with M2 approximately 1.35 in both dimensions from a 100 element, 100 microm pitch slab-coupled optical waveguide laser diode array using wavelength beam combining.